Thin clouds hung between the shore and mountains. A single tarmac road plodded east, and a smoky fire burned halfway up the hills.

Inland, it would rain.

Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, must be the only capital city in the world not connected to anywhere else by road. Port Moresby swelters alone.

Metal roofs, no apparent center. The parliament building, built in haus tambarin, or spirit house, style, just beside the runway.

A fair gale blew off the sea. Palms rattled along the utterly uncommercial waterfront. Brown shore water settled into azure after fifty meters, and a wooded hillock rose from the harbor half a mile out.

To Cecil Rhodes, the secret of imperialism was to “Teach the natives to want.” The Aussies brought an auto dealership, Coke and Pepsi signs, paved roads, a modern diplomatic community, and modest high rises. Without them would there be teeming anarchy, or would there have been less reason for country people to come to the capital for work?

Germans, Dutch and Australians had colonized the coasts of PNG, but they all assumed there was negligible value inland, over the hills, until the 1930s, when a group of Aussies disappeared over the rim and emerged with eyes wide as saucers and incredible stories of cannibalism and fantastic wildlife.

We flew into the highlands to see about that for ourselves.

•••••

Mt. Hagen, the gateway to the highlands, will scare you. I mean, it was grim, hostile and tense. You held your things tighter. And malaria was rife. The CDC said not “present” but “prevalent.”

Your first impression of the highlands might be of Malaysia - banana trees, brooding nimbus over far hills – but look closer and you’d think more of Tanzania, with filth in the gutters, firewood walking down the road on top of kids’ heads, people squatting by piles of betel nuts. Dirt.

In this mountain town of 30,000, there was a single downtown street, a rugby field, an airstrip and a rabble of housing. Claimed to have the best vegetable market in all of PNG.

The police barracks was a few score of little boxes like half a single-wide with a veranda, populated by wives and children. I might rather live in thatch. There was absolutely no other non-resident here. None.

Except one man from Osaka. He rode with us to the hotel.

The Hotel Highlander hid behind a gray metal barricade. Men in yellow hard hats rolled back the high gate. A six foot fence surrounded the compound and more men in hard hats walked snarling black dogs around the inside perimeter.

Inside, the walls were parchment thin and measurable dust infested the floor, but they did a pretty good job of serving dinner and stubbies, which is Aussie for short beer bottles. Third world chicken is third world chicken. But they curled the tops of spring onions as garnish. A stab at flair.

•••••

In the morning invisible helicopters thwapped at the air above the fog, circling the airport, waiting to land.

15 February 2010

Everybody knows what they like. Everybody has their own approach to where to stay on the road.

Compare this gentle rant against high-end hotel properties with this list of favorite high-end properties. What we have here are two writers headed in different directions.

But I agree with both.

We've all got our stories on the anti-expensive-hotel side. In December, 2006 the hotel just outside the O. R. Tambo International terminal at Johannesburg (which was not then an InterContinental Hotel as it is now) charged us for every last beer, orange drink and tonic water in the minibar. All of them.

That was because we cleared all of them out and placed them in the cabinet beside the minibar so that we could store food we brought back from their restaurant. When it was time to go we reassembled the minibar, but it was one of those pressure-sensitive models which charges you for anything that's lifted from its assigned place.

Of course we were adamant that that wasn't right and would not stand, and it didn't. But we had to send a member of the front desk staff up to confirm all their Pepsis were in place, all momentum came to a screeching halt for fifteen minutes at checkout, and the ill will transformed what had been a pleasant enough stay to an experience I'm still writing about today. Just far, far too mercenary.

10 November 2009

Pidgin is the mostly missionary-imposed form of English used originally to communicate with the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea.

In a land where as many as 800 different languages still exist, sometimes changing from valley to valley, a common form of communication became essential as proselitysing, travel and economic activity between the island inhabitants
and Europeans increased.

Tok Pisin, as it is officially known is "now considered a distinct language in its own right because it is a first language for some people and not merely a lingua franca to facilitate communication with speakers of other languages."

Sometimes Tok Pisin will make you smile. We brought this hotel door hanger back from our trip to the highlands Goroka Show several years ago.

(The next time you can manage to be anywhere near PNG in September, take your best camera gear and attend the Goroka Show. It's one of the things you really want to see in life. The next Goroka Show is 17 - 19 September, 2010.)

*****

"You no can come inside." Tok Pisin is a language even I could learn.

And while we're here, proving that there's just about everything somewhere on the internets, check out this really fine hotel door hangers collection as shared by Michael Liebowitz. He writes that his grandfather "had been in the foreign service and he had filled a whole wall of his
study with hotel door hangers from all his travels throughout the
world. They're really beautiful, in aggregate, and I wanted to share.
Enjoy."

Based on conversations we had on a trip along the Sepik River, which is in the country of Papua New Guinea, on the eastern side of the island, we wrote earlier about male initiation rites, here. Here is a brief excerpt:

“We believe the father gives us the knowledge but
the blood comes from the mother and so it must return to her. So my
mother’s brother came from another village.

“The night of the skin cutting we stayed up all night. When it was very
late the men made us go into the water and stay for one hour so our
skin would get soft. Ohhh, it was so cold!

Lawrence massaged his temples.

“When it was time I laid down on top of my mother’s brother. So the blood would fall on him. And they cut me.”

With a flourish he raised his right sleeve to show the results.

“Sometimes they cut your back but I asked they only cut my arms because I had to go back to work. “

He had to have time to heal. But he didn’t heal. He was infected.

“I asked for medicine but my grandfather refused. He asked me, ‘What
have you done wrong?’ I said nothing, nothing over and over but he kept
asking me until finally I admitted I had stayed with my girlfriend the
night before.

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